Part 12

But if “adulteresses” is taken in the figurative sense, there is still the friendship of the world that is enmity with God. The friendship of the world is preferred to that of God. “World”[87] here is not the earth with all its beauty and charm (God’s world made by him; cf. Psalm 19), nor mankind, for whom Christ died (John 3:16), but that world of selfish pleasure and sin out of which Christ called his disciples and which in turn hated them as it hated Christ (John 15:18 ff.). This world will only love as a familiar friend those who cater to its ideals and standards, who condone its slackness of morals and neglect of God.

This cleavage between the wayward, wicked world and the kingdom of God is a fact of the utmost significance (John 17:15 ff.). The Christian has to learn the secret of living in such a worldly atmosphere without being contaminated by it. One does not wish to be considered a religious crank and queer. He desires to have influence with his friends and business acquaintances. But one cannot be a “hail fellow well met” in sin and every form of worldly indulgence and retain his influence for God. The time comes when a choice must be made between friends, for that sort of life in the world becomes incompatible with friendship with God. One must make his choice. “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). One cannot run with the hare and the hounds. The devil makes no objection to such a double life of hypocrisy, but God does. God is gracious and forgiving to sinners who repent but has no mercy for presumptuous sinners who defy his kindness and keep in touch with the devil and his circles of evil.

The word “enmity” is the term for personal hostility. Preference for sin constitutes a personal offense toward God, who can have no rival, any more than a true wife can suffer a rival in the affections of her husband. “The mind of the flesh is enmity against God” (Rom. 8:7). One must make his choice. “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matt. 6:24). Plummer argues clearly that James does not condemn the scientist’s love of nature or the sociologist’s enthusiasm, which is not always shared in by preachers as much as is desirable.

Preaching often is so given to denunciation of sin that it fails to exalt the possibilities of the right sort of manhood. It thus repels the very men that it wishes to attract. So far from that, love for man is one of the main proofs of love for God (1 John 4:20). The passion for the souls of men is the true mark of the redeemed. Paul (Titus 2:12) urges that “denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live ... godly in this present world” (or “age” more exactly). “Whosoever therefore would be a friend of the world maketh himself an enemy of God,” “whoever, then, chooses to be the world’s friend turns enemy to God” (Moffatt).

A person makes his choice as he is able to do by the exercise of his own will and purpose. But once and finally made, he renders himself _ipso facto_ an enemy to God. There is no help for it so long as God is really the God of purity and righteousness. Josephus calls Poppea, the infamous wife of Nero and proselyte to Judaism, a worshiper of God (_Ant._ xx. 8. 11), but surely such “worship” was not acceptable to God. James (2:23) has termed Abraham “the friend of God,” but he entered into that relation to God on terms of obedience to God as Lord. On no other terms is friendship with God possible. It is not a question of one’s feelings but of the actual state of affairs. “To be on terms of friendship with the world involves living on terms of enmity with God” (Hort).

The word “friendship” does not itself occur elsewhere in the New Testament, though it is found several times in Proverbs; but the words “friend” and to “love as a friend” are common enough. Gildersleeve (_Justin Martyr_, p. 135) notes that Xenophon uses the two verbs for love as synonymous. But in the New Testament there is a distinction drawn in John 21:15-17. The one is the “deeper” and richer word, while the other is the “more human.”[88] Certainly one has no right to claim intimate family relationship with God as his friend while at the same time living in adulterous relations with the sinful world that hates God. The “seductions of the world” (Plummer) are very real and very many, but surrender to them is not constant with the fellowship of God. The law of spiritual life is not always understood. Some men wonder why they are not spiritually happy, why they do not enjoy religion. They are living in sin with the world and yet marvel at their lack of communion with God.

The Yearning of the Spirit for Us (4:5 f.)

“Or think ye?” says James, as the alternative. Either the friendship of the world is enmity with God or you think “that the scripture speaketh in vain.” “What, do you consider this an idle word of Scripture?” (Moffatt). This rhetorical question expects an indignant denial. Therefore, the argument holds that the friendship of the world is enmity with God. But what is the Scripture? Is it only the passage in verse 6 that is referred to? The punctuation of the Revised Version allows that. We have two questions before the one quotation. But it may be that the general sense of Scripture is meant by the first question. Usually “the Scripture” occurs before a direct quotation, as in Romans 4:3.

Some would take the rest of verse 5 after the first question as a quotation, although no such quotation occurs in the Old Testament. The general sense appears in various parts of the Old Testament, as in Exodus 20:5: “I am the Lord thy God, a jealous God.” Compare Isaiah 63:8-16; Zechariah 8:2. Oesterley even sees a direct allusion to Galatians 5:17, 21; Romans 8:6, 8; 1 Corinthians 3:16, and an argument for the late date of the Epistle of James. But this is forcing the matter rather stiffly. The New Testament writers seem to have used chains of quotations (catenae) as, for instance, in Romans 3:10-18. Paul probably makes a free paraphrase of Isaiah 64:4 in 1 Corinthians 2:9, and of Isaiah 60:1-2 in Ephesians 5:14. Either this is what is done here, or James is already referring to verse 6, a quotation from Proverbs 3:34.

It is not necessary to take the second sentence in verse 5 as a question. We may follow the margin: “The spirit which he made to dwell in us he yearneth for even unto jealous envy,” or “with jealousy doth He yearn after the spirit which he causeth to dwell in us” (Hort), or “He yearns jealously for the spirit he set within us” (Moffatt). In one case (the question) we take “the Spirit” as a subject and as the Holy Spirit. In the other case (the affirmation) we take “spirit” as object and as our redeemed spirit planted in us by God (cf. Rom. 8:4-16 for both ideas). In either rendering it is the Spirit of God (cf. Rom. 8:9) who dwells in us and helps us strive against the evil forces of the world in our own hearts.

God has sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts (Gal. 4:6), who helps us in the fight with the flesh (Gal. 5:16-26). It is the doctrine of the indwelling Spirit of God, a very precious doctrine in the New Testament (John 7:39; 16:7; Rom. 8:11; 1 Cor. 3:16; Gal. 4:6; Eph. 3:17; 4:30). The Spirit of God has made his home in us. This is our glory and our hope.

The word for “yearn” is a very strong one. It is the verb in Psalm 42:1: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” Peter uses it of the longing of newborn babes after the sincere milk of the word (1 Peter 2:2). So Paul yearns after the Philippians (1:8).

There are many interpretations and many ways of punctuating the words “unto jealous envy” or “with jealousy.” We may not tarry over them. Probably the idea is that the Holy Spirit covets our souls. He does not wish the devil to have us. Usually this word for jealous envy has a bad sense, but the context here makes it clear. God is a jealous God. He can brook no rival in our hearts. God wishes the whole of our heart’s love, not just a part. He claims the rights of a loving husband to all our heart’s devotion. In our hours of doubt and weakness “the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Rom. 8:26). We may thank God that he is a jealous God for his people Israel. He broods over his children with a mother’s love, longing for their growth and development.

“But he giveth more grace” (literally, “greater grace”), “yet he gives grace more and more” (Moffatt). The words “giveth grace” come from the quotation following (Prov. 3:34). The effect of this jealous affection on God’s part is not to abandon us but to heap more and richer favors upon us. God demands of us wholehearted surrender and service, but he pours out the wealth of his love upon us. “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble.”

This Septuagint quotation (see also 1 Peter 5:5) is a free translation of the idea in the Hebrew text. It is the striking figure of God standing in the way, across the path of the proud man who carries his head so high above others. He will in due time be brought low. Pride goes before a fall, for God is to be met along that road (cf. Acts 18:6; Rom. 13:2). The man of the world feels no need of God and feels secure and serene. But he reckons without his Host. God shows favor to the humble (cf. the contrast in 1:10).

The proud men think themselves the monopolists (Hort) of divine favor, but they find out sooner or later that they are passed by in favor of the man with lowliness of spirit and nobility of life, who makes God, not the world, the Lord of his life. This man God honors with far more grace than the world can offer. He will have trouble (“with persecutions”), no doubt, “but he shall receive a hundredfold now in this time,” while “in the world to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29 f.). The prince in God’s kingdom and at his court is not the man who wears the trappings of earthly rank and station but the one who caught the spirit of Jesus and sought to do good to all as he found opportunity. Plummer wonders if James had not heard his mother recite the Magnificat. Certainly he here echoes the same beautiful spirit.

Choice Between God and the Devil (4:7-8a)

It comes to this, that a man must decide whether or not God is to rule his life. It is self or God, and that is the same thing as the devil or God, for a self without God is ruled by the devil. “Be subject therefore unto God,” since, as James has shown in verse 6, God gives grace to the humble and withstands the proud. “The proud spirit has to be curbed” (Oesterley). Peter has expanded this idea in a great passage (1 Peter 5:6-9). Our only hope is under the leadership of God. The devil is the “prince of the world” (John 14:30), and he has plenty of help in the world rulers of darkness (Eph. 6:11 f.). The proud and self-willed are sure to fall into his condemnation (1 Tim. 3:6).

“But resist the devil.” Take your stand (note the aorist tense) in the face of the devil, the great hinderer and slanderer. The fight is on between the forces of God and Satan, and one must take sides. A man once said that he wished to be impartial in the struggle between God and the devil. That species of liberality is out of the question. He that is not with Christ is against him. There is no middle ground.

James does not stop to parley over the existence of the devil. He assumes the reality of the dread agent of evil, who is bent on the destruction of all that is good in man. The point to see clearly is that there is but one thing to do, and that is to fight the devil, not with fire but with the word of God, with the help of the Spirit of God. “Get thee hence, Satan,” Jesus had to say (Matt. 4:10). “And he will flee from you.” The devil will run if we fight him with the might of God. One way to submit to God is to fight off the devil.

But it is not all negative. The converse is true also. “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.” The Hebrew had a technical term for drawing nigh to God for the purpose of worship (Ex. 19:22; Jer. 30:21). It is not true that the devil is irresistible and it is useless to oppose him (Plummer). This is one of the pleas of the devil himself to break down the resisting power of the human will and so to take all fight out of us. The principle that James here announces is true to Scripture, to psychology, and to human experience. If we draw nigh to the devil, he will draw nigh to us. If we resist him, he will flee from us. If we resist God, even God will finally depart from us and leave us to our sins. If we approach God in worship, he opens his heart to us. “Return unto me, and I will return unto you” (Zech. 1:3). “To this end was the Son of man manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). “The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him” (Psalm 145:18, AV). God first draws nigh unto us (John 16:16), and when we respond, lo, he is there before us. The place of safety and of power for the Christian is the throne of grace. There he has a mighty Friend and Helper (Heb. 4:16). We can draw close to God, as a child to his father in the dark, and feel his presence.

A Call to Repentance (4:8b-10)

Here James speaks like one of the Old Testament prophets. His epistle, while thoroughly Christian, is yet nearer to the standpoint of the Old Testament prophets than any other book in the New Testament. “Cleanse your hands, ye sinners.” The priests washed their hands before they entered the tabernacle to worship (Ex. 30:19-21; Lev. 16:4). It was natural for the language to be applied to moral purity: “I will wash my hands in innocency: so will I compass thine altar, O Jehovah” (Psalm 26:6). See also Hebrews 10:22. So Pilate sought to emphasize his own freedom from guilt by washing his hands (Matt. 27:24), if by so doing he might also soothe his own conscience. It is now as it has always been: “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart” (Psalm 24:3 f., AV).

The clean hands signify little in a moral sense—however desirable for sanitary and other reasons—unless the heart is also clean. Indeed, the Pharisees came to make the cleansing of the hands a substitute for moral cleanness (Mark 7:8 ff.). “Purify your hearts, ye doubleminded.” The word for purification here is the common one for ceremonial cleansing (Ex. 19:10), but the idea is figurative, as in 1 Peter 1:22 and 1 John 3:3. James seems to refer to Psalm 73:13. “Wash you, make you clean” (Isa. 1:16). The double-minded (cf. James 1:8) must no longer halt between two opinions. They must forsake the world and give God the whole heart. It is a brave word for reality in religion and against the hollow mockery of mere lip service.

In verse 9 we have a rather unusual exhortation for the New Testament. The word for repentance does not mean sorrow but change of mind and life. The need for a change implies sorrow for the sins of one’s life, to be sure. But one may have sorrow and still not change his heart and life. The thing that counts is the change, not the degree of the sorrow. But, certainly, sorrow for sin is appropriate and natural for the sinner who turns away from it. There is certainly room for the appeal to “be afflicted, and mourn, and weep” (all aorists with a note of urgency in the tense). One is reminded of the “woe” of Jesus in Luke 6:25. We have here a call to the godly sorrow described in 2 Corinthians 7:10. There is a time to laugh and a time to mourn; yes, and a time for laughter to be turned to mourning and even for joy to be turned into heaviness, like the poor publican with downcast eyes in the Temple before God (Luke 18:13). “The words express the contrast between the loud unseemly gaiety of the pleasure-seeker, and the subdued mien and downcast look of the penitent” (Oesterley).

“Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord.” This is the only proper attitude for the sinner, whether saved or unsaved. See the same figure in 1 Peter 5:6. The proud Pharisee in Luke 18:11 is the picture of all that worship should not be.

“And he shall exalt you.” This is the law of grace, as is often stated by Jesus: “Every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted” (Luke 14:11). But the man that humbles himself before the eye of the Lord must do so because of real apprehension of his own sin and need of forgiveness, not for the purpose of future exaltation to be obtained by momentary self-abnegation. The delicate balance of motives here is preserved. The promise will come true only if the person really turns to the Lord with sincerity of heart. Nothing is more needed today than this prostration before God.

Captious Criticism (4:11 f.)

Moffatt places these verses just after 2:13, since this seems to have been its original place. This is the position also given by Oesterley. And yet it is quite possible that James here merely recurs to the subject of the loose tongue, as he had already done once (cf. 1:26; 3:2 ff.). See also 5:12. He has one word more on this burning topic, a sort of postscript on the tongue, an extremely difficult subject to say the last word about. “Speak not one against another, brethren.” The tense of the verb (present durative) implies that some of them had been doing precisely this thing.

It is so easy to “talk down on one,” to act as critic (cf. Matt. 7:1) of one’s brother in Christ. We cannot help forming opinions of each other, but we can avoid captious criticism, sharp and needless censure. The point made by James is that this habit assumes the right to judge the very law of God. It is far easier to play the part of critic of the law than to be a doer of the law. Destructive criticism is always the cheaper exercise and the more useless. Constructive criticism is more creative and much harder.

There is one supreme Lawgiver and Judge, “he who is able to save and destroy.” This power belongs to God, the Creator (Matt. 10:28; Luke 6:9), not to man, the creature. The critic of the law prefers to find flaws in the law rather than to undertake to obey it. He assumes that he can enact a better law, but it is all assumption. James shows his impatience with such criticism by saying, “But who art thou that judgest thy neighbor?” See Romans 14:4. In common law we are to give every man the benefit of the doubt and to assume his innocence till his guilt is proven. But in current speech the sharp tongue follows no such rule of reason but creates suspicion and sows hate and strife at every turn.

XI God and Business

The arrogance of the sinful heart is clearly shown in 4:13 to 5:6. Such a heart prefers worldliness to the worship of God (see 4:1-10) and flippantly criticizes one’s neighbors with lighthearted satisfaction with self and a positive love of faultfinding (4:11 f.). This easy arrogance faces the future with unconcern. No look Godward is taken in business ventures. James “opposes the irreligious sense of travelling merchants” (Windisch). These Jews of the Diaspora had come to have a considerable part of the business of the Roman Empire. They professed to be servants of God, but in practice they often denied and ignored the God of their fathers.

Leaving God Out (4:13-15)

One may hope that James alludes to the Jewish merchants, not Jewish Christians. Certainly those Jewish merchants who became Christians continued their business, though not in a godless fashion. The merchant has one of the most useful and most honorable of all callings, but it seems clear that some of the Jewish merchants had already brought disfavor upon the business by their sharp practices. See Sirach 26:29. “A merchant will hardly keep himself from doing wrong; and a huckster will not be declared free from sin.” This piece of moralizing is evidently occasioned by some tricks in trade indulged in by Jewish merchants. One is bound to admit that some modern Jews retain some of the same reputation in certain lines of trade.

But the point that James makes is a peril to Christian merchants also. The keen competition in all kinds of business is a constant temptation to violate the Golden Rule and to ignore God as well as the welfare of one’s customers in order to make money and to meet a rival who is unscrupulous in trade. The Christian businessman today can do business on a high plane. Hustle and enterprise need not condescend to underhand methods. It is a pleasure to note the activity of the Gideons, an organization of Christian men who, besides doing other useful things, have placed copies of the Bible in the rooms of most American hotels. These men have not left God out.

In Palestine the Jews held on to the agricultural life, but in the Diaspora they were merchants and bankers. Philo (In Flaccum VIII) gives a picture of the Jewish merchants and bankers in Alexandria. Josephus (Ant. XII, 2-5) alludes to the Jewish traveling merchant about 175 B.C. One of the wonders of history is how the Jews, scattered over the world, finally without a land of their own, have yet by their wits maintained themselves as a race and a religion and have been leaders in business, in art, in music, in politics, in literature.

“Come now, ye that say” is the impatient challenge of James to those who leave God out of account in their plans for the future. The tone of impatience is due to the conviction that one should be so conscious of his own weakness as not to boast about the future. “To-day or tomorrow we will go into this city, and spend a year there, and trade, and get gain.” And then we shall move on to the next town and work that with our wares, for all the world like a modern “fire sale” or secondhand clothing store with its bankruptcy or fire features. The picture is drawn from life. The use of “this city” is merely typical, as if James were pointing it out on the map (Mayor), and is more vivid than “such and such a city.”

In James 1:11 we read that the rich man shall “fade away in his goings,” an allusion to the travels of the rich merchants. We see the rapid movements of the Jewish Christians illustrated by the travels of Aquila and Priscilla, who came from Rome to Corinth (Acts 18:1 f.), then to Ephesus (18:18), to Rome again (Rom. 16:3), and back to Ephesus (2 Tim. 4:19). The phrase “spend a year there” is literally “do a year there,” and the idiom occurs also in Acts 15:33; 20:3 (cf. Prov. 13:23).

The wide dispersion of the Jews all over the Roman Empire gave them business connections that made it easy to get new business and to hold the old trade. The very word here for “trade” means to travel into a region to get business, just like a modern commercial traveler. Our word “emporium” is just this word. The Jews made the very Temple itself “a house of merchandise.” So then trading implied traveling for business (Matt. 22:5).

In 2 Peter 2:3 a somber light is thrown by this same word: “And in covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you.” “And get gain.” This is the climax of the whole, the aim of the journeys and the trading. “The frequent conjunctions separate the different items of the plan, which are rehearsed thus one by one with manifest satisfaction. The speakers gloat over the different steps of the programme which they have arranged for themselves” (Plummer). There is no harm in planning to make money or in travel for that purpose. The harm lies in the complete ignoring of God in all their plans.